Monthly Rollup | April 2018

Check out some of the cool things we’re working on at Envato HQ and read all the latest news, announcements and updates from this past month!

WordPress Sales Page

The Marketing Team have announced an experiment that includes the use of a new landing page around ThemeForest WordPress item discounts.

For the period of the experiment, a subset of visitors to ThemeForest will see a new item in the WordPress submenu for this new landing page. People who click on that link will be taken to a new landing page displaying discounted WordPress themes.

The landing page is already live and you can check it out now. The experiment will run for a few weeks – Check out all the details in the forum post here.

Changes to VideoHive Upload Permissions

We have just announced changes to how authors upload video items to Envato. As many of you may be aware, the video review queues at Envato have been steadily increasing as more authors seek to have their items published and available to customers. Stock footage, in particular, has seen an increase in volume that far outpaces our ability to review quickly.

We’ve introduced new policies such as batch review as a way to improve efficiency. The result has been a dramatic decrease in the queues but we think there’s more we can do to further reduce wait times. One of the challenges our reviewers have is that they invest a lot of time reviewing items that do not meet our requirements.

In some cases, reviewers are investing time in authors who are not as experienced in a specific category or who are facing the same item rejection reasons with each batch of items they upload. This results in delays for great content reaching customers and delayed earnings for authors who do consistently meet our guidelines.

So, from now, we will be introducing some limits to what categories video authors can upload to and when. Check out the full announcement on the forums here.

Envato Hosted: Hosting Post-Purchase Experiment

The Hosted team are now experimenting with a new managed WordPress hosting plan available to ThemeForest customers, post-purchase. This will be promoted on downloads and confirmation pages, initially replacing existing Studio ‘Install theme’ buttons for a selection of themes already on the Hosted platform.

As these customers already own the theme, we’re able to significantly reduce the cost of hosting, initially offering the plan at $6 per month or $60 a year, including theme installation, managed WordPress hosting and hosting support. Read more about the announcement on the forums here.

Forum Redesign

As you may know, we’ve been planning a bit of a forum refresh around here. We haven’t done much with the default look of Discourse forums since we launched so we wanted to add a fresh coat of paint. We’d like to get things a bit more organized and less overwhelming for new users.

Registrations are OPEN for EuroTour 2018!

This June, we’re making our way from Australia to Europe for EuroTour 2018! EuroTour is a special opportunity to spark big movements, give rise to great ideas, inspire your future work as a leader in the industry – and even develop lifelong friendships or collaborations!

We’re trying out a new style of EuroTour meetup this year, which will be held in two parts; a presentation session and an afterparty! We hope this format will enable Authors to attend around their other commitments, by giving them the choice to attend the full meetup or one of the sessions.

Dont forget! We are planning on visiting:

London, United Kingdom

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Berlin, Germany

Moscow, Russia

Kiev, Ukraine

Belgrade, Serbia

Bucharest, Romania

Check out the confirmed schedule, dates and locations to register now before spaces run out!

Elements Fonts Contest | Win $2,500 in Prizes!

We’re running an Elements contest to find the best new Fonts on Envato Elements! If you’ve been thinking of upskilling, now is the perfect time to do so!

Here are the top reasons why you should expand your creative skills with fonts:

Fonts are trending!

Designing a font is a great way to try both traditional and digital media.

Your drawing skills will improve.

You’ll learn a new skill, which can be added to your portfolio.

You will become more proficient in design by learning how to pair and combine fonts.

Free File Nominations for April-June are Now Open.

Want to get some exposure? Nominate your items for our free files promotion! You can find full nomination details for each marketplace in the forum post here. You can also check out all the other marketing opportunities available for authors on the forums here: Envato Marketing.

Research Participants Author Group

We’re looking for authors who are interested in regularly participating in research opportunities here at Envato.

Over the last few years, we’ve been growing our capacity to invite authors to our research and discovery activities here at Envato. In the past, you may have participated in card sorting activities, been invited to a video or audio call, participated in a focus group or been interviewed in person during a meetup. All of these activities are part of our efforts to get insight into the author experience as we build and iterate here at Envato.

Often this will be participating in simple surveys to help us understand things like how you want to receive announcements from Envato, or what uploading methods you like, or what trends you think will be the next ‘big thing’ here at Envato. Most won’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes to complete.

Changes to the Market Shopfront Platform (PhotoDune & 3DOcean)

As you may know, we have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to refresh our infrastructure in order to build a faster and more flexible marketplace. These updates will allow us to quickly roll out changes that our customers love.

While we are focusing on redesigning the search experience, we have also started to migrate the homepages to the Market Shopfront platform so that customers may also benefit from a refreshed user experience and design in the near future.

As of the 3rd of May 2018, PhotoDune and 3DOcean are the first markets to have their homepage traffic served via the Market Shopfront platform. The design and functionality is like-for-like compared to the existing homepage with a few small considerations around the ‘Follow Feed’ removed, Featured Author and ‘Newest Items’ section are not restricted to one item per author (will be fixed in 4-6 weeks) and ‘Featured Author’ functionality will be restored in 6-8 weeks.

We’re excited to launch these changes in preparation for new homepages for your marketplace – stay tuned for more updates!

ThemeForest Search Results Testing

The Conversion team are continuing their ongoing work in optimizing the experience for customers by testing how key features, highlighting and tags directly impacts search results. The latest rounds of testing has shown that the same set of items had a higheradd to cart and conversion rate with the addition of ‘Key Features’ than when they did not. Read the full announcement here.

The team are now looking at testing Search/Category pages to determine if an image carousel helps users select and purchase an item. Watch this space!

Do more of what you love.This year, we’re challenging our Envato Elements author community to grow our library to 1 million items. Join the challenge, we've got $30k in prizes to give away.Make Your Pledge Now!